Clinton Expected to Recover from Clot

Clinton Expected to Recover from Clot

Article excerpt

Doctors said the blood clot, which seemed to take members of the
secretary of state's staff by surprise, had not resulted in a stroke
or neurological damage.

CORRECTION APPENDED

Doctors for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton have said
that a blood clot has formed in her head, a potentially serious
condition from which they nonetheless stress that they expect her to
fully recover.

Mrs. Clinton, 65, was hospitalized on Sunday at NewYork-
Presbyterian Hospital for the blood clot -- in a vein between the
brain and the skull and behind her right ear -- and the doctors said
Monday that it had not resulted in a stroke or neurological damage.
They said they were trying to dissolve the clot by treating her with
blood thinners.

"She will be released once the medication dose has been
established," according to the statement from Dr. Lisa Bardack and
Dr. Gigi El-Bayoumi.

Clots like the one Mrs. Clinton has can be serious, said doctors
not involved in her care. Dr. David Langer, a brain surgeon and an
associate professor at the North Shore-Hofstra-Long Island Jewish
School of Medicine, said that if this type of clot were to go
untreated, it could cause blood to back up and could lead to a
hemorrhage inside the brain.

Mrs. Clinton's doctors struck an upbeat tone in their statement.
"In all other aspects of her recovery, the secretary is making
excellent progress, and we are confident she will make a full
recovery," it said. "She is in good spirits, engaging with her
doctors, her family and her staff."

The sudden turn in Mrs. Clinton's condition appeared to take her
aides by surprise. As recently as Sunday afternoon, they thought
that she was on the mend and ready to return to work this week.

"Yep, she's looking forward to getting back to the office this
week and resuming her schedule (plan is Wednesday)," a close aide,
Philippe Reines, replied to an e-mail inquiry.

But by 7:30 p.m. Sunday, all that had changed. Mrs. Clinton, who
had been home for more than two weeks nursing injuries sustained
after she fainted and hit her head, suffering a concussion, had been
admitted at NewYork-Presbyterian with an ominous diagnosis: a blood
clot stemming from the concussion, Mr. Reines said.

Instantly, the woman who, before even announcing, has been widely
viewed as a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination
in 2016, someone who has spent the past four years keeping up a
grueling schedule in which she racked up miles as the most-traveled
secretary of state and visited 112 countries, was seeming
uncharacteristically fragile.

Instead of talking about who might be her running mate, or how
she had, even on Monday, again been named the most admired woman in
the United States in a Gallup poll, the chatter on the Potomac
shifted to talk about how, at the end of the day, she is a 65-year-
old woman trying to recover after falling and hitting her head.

This being Washington, there was plenty of political finger-
pointing.

On Twitter, those sympathetic to Mrs. Clinton lashed out at
Republican critics who had accused her of faking her illness.
BuzzFeed helpfully chronicled the top "eight people who thought
Hillary Clinton was faking her concussion" because she did not want
to testify before Congress on the attacks in Benghazi, Libya. …